Gamifying For Your Audience Looking to gamify your course experience, but don’t know what types...

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Gamifying For Your Audience

 

Looking to gamify your course experience, but don’t know what types of games will work for your audience? Using existing research on gaming can help us to empathize with learners to design courses that both entertain them and help them retain learning. The Entertainment Software Association releases Essential Facts About the Video Game Industry reports that can give us some insight into how we can leverage games in learning.

 

Some stats that might help course designers empathize with a wide variety of audiences include:

 

Audience ages 45-54

Top 3 games genres, in order of preference, are:

• Casual games (Tetris, Solitaire)
• Arcade games (Pac-Man, Pinball)
• Action games (Super Mario Odyssey, Grand Theft Auto)

 

Audience ages 35-44

Top 3 games genres, in order of preference, are:

• Casual games
• Racing games (Need for Speed, Forza)
• Action games

 

Audience ages 18-34

Top 3 games genres, in order of preference, are:

• Casual games
• Shooter games (Fortnite, Call of Duty)
• Action games

 

For example, as an Instructional Designer, this tells me that if I had a very diverse audience of all ages, adding casual gameplay elements to a course design would be appealing for all!

 

So, a use case for this information would be: if I’m creating an onboarding course and want to add a fun game-like element that would appeal to all potential new hires, I could use a casual game element. Word games often fall into this category, so I could ask learners to match acronyms or commonly used terminology to its meaning (like you would playing Memory) or create a crossword puzzle.

 

Your turn:

Think about a course topic you’re instructing now and the audience. In the comments, let me know in 1-2 sentences:

• What topic would you gamify and what game would you draw inspiration from?
• Or, share what topic are you teaching and who your audience is to ask others in this Community for inspiration!

Rabia.Ijaz1787

Thank you for sharing and posting this, recently I have seen Wordle getting popular among the audience aged 18-34. The game is very simple with a 5 x 6 grid, where the player has 6 attempts to guess the 5 letter word of the day. If they get a letter in the correct place it turns green and yellow if it's a letter in the word but in the wrong place. I think it's an example of a game that can be integrated into any topic or subject. For example, when learning English individuals need to recall the word and the exact spelling in order to win the game.